Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is... show more

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities.But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art.The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.From the Hardcover edition.

‘When he finally speaks he has stopped shaking, but the effort has cost him. ‘I paint in God’s service,’ he says, with the air of a novitiate delivering a litany he has been taught but not fully understood. ‘And it is forbidden for me to talk with women.’ Alessandra Cecci is not quite fifteen when...

Overall I give 3.5 stars. The story blended historical fact very well with the fictional story of the main character. It gave enough detail but not so much that it was like reading non-fiction. The writer did an excellent job of inserting the MC and her family into the events of the time period that...

Deja vu. I started reading this today and realized that I read this before although I don't remember when, but I remember bits and dribbles. It was first published in 2003, so it wasn't so long ago. In any case, it was long before GR.

We meet Alessandra Cecchi, the protagonist and narrator of this first person novel, who we meet as a young girl, only fourteen-years of age in 1492 when the book starts. She lived, as the curse goes, in interesting times. Alessandra was raised in Florence at the height of the Renaissance, the city o...

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